User talk:MF-Warburg/Board election 2013

Excellent! Theo10011 (talk) 01:26, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Re John Vandenberg

Thanks MF-Warburg for publishing your thoughts on the candidates.

Regarding board composition, I have proposed all seats are community elected, with a 6:4 split between community and non-community seats:

• 4+2 community members
• 4 non-community people

The only people who are eligible for the two additional community seats are people who have served on the board for four years. According to Template:BoardChart is limited to: User:Jimbo Wales, w:User:Michael Davis (User:Bookofjude?), User:Mindspillage/Kat Walsh, User:Jan-Bart, User:Stu, User:Anthere, User:Sj, User:Wing and User:Bishdatta when her term expires at the end of 2015. They are all Wikimedians, and you would choose which two you want to elect. Of those, I am not sure about Michael Davis, and Bishdatta is the only other people who wasn't a Wikimedia contributor before joining the board, but I think she has earnt her right to be considered part of the Wikimedia community, and to stand as a candidate to be re-elected for a third term if the community believes she has done a good job. That list would grow over time. Jimmy would likely continue to be elected to the board by the community, but the proposed structure allows other experienced Board of Trustee members to fill his shoes when/if required.

I agree that we don't want to install LiquidThreads 1.0 on more wikis, but I looked at Echo and Flow and thought they looked good as a replacement for LiquidThreads. Do you not agree that we need a more user-friendly comment system? Or, do you believe that Flow hasn't been designed correctly? I would love to hear more. John Vandenberg (talk) 10:16, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for removing the part about board composition. I want more community seats, rather than less, and I would oppose any bylaw change which reduced the community's involvement in the board composition. John Vandenberg (talk) 02:02, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

(pseudo-edit-conflict) Yes, I see I severely mis-read or mis-remembered your ideas to change the composition of the Board. I was thinking you proposed that only 4 community members should be elected, and those in the other categories elected by the Board like currently. That is of course very different, and I should revise this part of my notes (and maybe votes).

Regarding Flow, I indeed think that we do not need a "more user-friendly comment system" and that Flow has not been designed correctly because this cannot possibly be designed correctly. I was planning to write these my thoughts on Talk:Flow at some time, but I will write them here now. The ideas behind Flow (or LiquidThreads in the past) are maybe honourable, but I expect it to be a clear failure. Already LQT was hyped as a super-brilliant innovation, but ended up as an unmaintained extension that cannot even be removed anymore from the wikis that were so unfortunate to get it. Plainly, I think the assumptions on mw:Flow Portal are false. "Talk pages—as a discussion technology" are not "antiquated and user-hostile". They are quite usable, as we see by discussing on this page. They also provide a very useful flexibility and freedom for the users (in contrast, a considerable amount of time is spent on thinking where Flow can not be used). Plain-text editing is not something you get on most sites("plain" not meant as a contrast to using the VisualEditor), but most sites don't build encyclopedias either. It may take a bit to get acquainted to using them at first, yes. But once you understood it, it's really simple. Just a colon, and your comment is ordered. I do remember how I read some documentation pages several years back (on the German Wikipedia) and then I never had many problems with this concept. It also allows easy moving of topics, splitting discussions, and what not, which definitely would be more difficult to do when the discussion parts are forced to be "technically split". — In short, Flow is advocated as a better system which would be more user-friendly, but this is why I don't think it would have many advantages over the current system. --MF-W 04:58, 9 June 2013 (UTC)